Selected Stories of Anton Chekov - By Anton Chekhov Page 0,34

of extraordinary wise men who knew all, of remarkably hard workers who didn’t sleep for weeks at a time, of numerous martyrs and victims of science; with him good triumphs over evil, the weak always overcome the strong, the wise the stupid, the humble the proud, the young the old … There is no need to take all these legends and tall tales at face value, but sift them and what you need will be left in the filter: our good traditions and the names of true heroes recognized by all.

In our society all information about the world of scholars is summed up in anecdotes about the extraordinary absentmindedness of old professors and two or three quips ascribed to Gruber, or to me, or to Babukhin.6 For educated society that is not enough. If it loved learning, scholars and students as much as Nikolai does, its literature would long have had whole epics, sagas, and saints’ lives, such as it unfortunately does not have now.

Having told me the news, Nikolai puts a solemn expression on his face, and we begin to talk business. If at that moment some outsider should hear how freely Nikolai handles terminology, he might think that he was a scholar disguised as a soldier. Incidentally, the rumors about the learnedness of university caretakers are greatly exaggerated. True, Nikolai knows more than a hundred Latin names, can assemble a skeleton, prepare a slide on occasion, make the students laugh with some long, learned citation, but so unsophisticated a thing as the theory of the circulation of the blood is as obscure for him now as twenty years ago.

At the table in my office, bending low over a book or a slide, sits my prosector Pyotr Ignatievich, a hardworking, humble, but untalented man of about thirty-five, already bald and with a big stomach. He works from morning to night, reads voluminously, remembers everything he reads excellently—and in that respect he’s not a man, he’s pure gold; in all the rest he’s a cart horse, or, to put it differently, an educated dolt. The characteristic features that distinguish the cart horse from a talented man are these: his horizon is narrow and sharply limited by his profession; outside his profession he is as naïve as a child. I remember coming into the office one morning and saying:

“Imagine, what a misfortune! They say Skobelev7 is dead.”

Nikolai crossed himself, but Pyotr Ignatievich turned to me and asked:

“Which Skobelev is that?”

Another time—this was a little earlier—I announced that Professor Perov8 had died. Dear old Pyotr Ignatievich asked:

“What did he teach?”

I believe if Patti9 started singing right in his ear, if hordes of Chinese invaded Russia, even if there was an earthquake, he wouldn’t stir a single limb and would quite calmly go on peering with his screwed-up eye into his microscope. In short, Hecuba is nothing to him.10 I’d pay dearly to see how that dry crust sleeps with his wife.

Another feature: a fanatical faith in the infallibility of science and above all of everything the Germans write. He’s sure of himself, of his slides, he knows the goal of life, and is totally unacquainted with the doubts and disappointments that turn talented heads gray. A slavish worship of authority and a lack of any need for independent thinking. To talk him out of anything is difficult, to argue with him is impossible. Try arguing with a person who is profoundly convinced that the best science is medicine, the best people are doctors, the best traditions are medical traditions. The nefarious past of medicine has survived only in one tradition—the white tie now worn by doctors; for the scientist and for the educated man in general, only university-wide traditions can exist, with no divisions into medical, legal, and so on, but Pyotr Ignatievich finds it hard to agree with that, and he is prepared to argue with you till doomsday

His future I can picture clearly In his lifetime he will prepare several hundred slides of an extraordinary neatness, write a lot of dry but quite decent papers, make a dozen or so conscientious translations, but he won’t set the world on fire. To set the world on fire, you need fantasy, inventiveness, intuition, and Pyotr Ignatievich has nothing of the sort. To put it briefly, in science he is not a master, but a servant.

Pyotr Ignatievich, Nikolai and I are talking in low voices. We’re slightly ill at ease. You feel something peculiar when the auditorium murmurs like the sea behind the